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Sketches and Paintings

" Poetry does not fly above and surmount the earth in order to escape it and hover over it.Poetry is what first brings man onto the earth, making him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling. "

Martin Heidegger

kaltreisblue200.jpg

Study sketch for Al-Esch Piazza by Lucien Steil (1978)
( This colour-pencil sketch has been computer-processed )

I am a practising architect and educator and I do acknowledge fully the extraordinary opportunities of computer graphics and new design technologies.

However I like to consider these excellent contemporary design tools as a complement, an enrichment, a further extension of our mind and our hands, rather than as a substitute to the training and development of our manual and intellectual skills.

Piazza with Golden Sky

Piazza and Fountain,oil on lino by Lucien Steil (1996)

I myself like to cultivate and improve my artisanal skills, as well as to increase my practical knowledge of new technologies. I like to operate within appropriate choices and combined tools for the most appropriate, the most elegant, the most efficient results!

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" Retour de Potsdam ", oil on lino by Lucien Steil (1996)

I consider freehand sketching, painting and graphic experimentation as essential tools of the design process, and particularly of that wonderfully complex elaboration of a more and more comprehensive synthesis, from first conceptual diagrams to final design proposals.

Villa in Potsdam 1997

A quiet Place,tempera on lino by Lucien Steil (1995)

" It is the way of poets to shut their eyes to actuality. Instead of acting, they dream. What they make is merely imagined. Things of imagination are merely made. Making is in Greek, POIESIS. "

Martin Heidegger

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Riverside Piazza, oil on lino by Lucien Steil (1997)

The architectural subject creates its own space, landscape and atmosphere as a fundamental part of its essence...The union of the sky and the earth and life is expressed in the genesis of architecture and the city, articulated through the analogies and metaphors of the pictoral process. The eerie silence and dreamlike atmosphere of the sketches and paintings, in a context of " Magical Realism ", do refer to the specific realm of a virtual reality to be inhabited by life, and definitely not to some unbridgeable distance between ideality and reality.

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Lighthouse Island, Sketchbook, by Lucien Steil

I like to look on these sketches and paintings as furtive and partial reflections on the eternal nature of architecture, or as mysterious fragments of its immutable essence...